My father died on a hospice cot in the living room, surrounded by his family, his books and records and the chair where he’d read the newspaper every morning I could remember.
It was not a peaceful death. My father was just 58, and he was furious. When the nurse first dabbed a morphine-soaked sponge against his lips, he croaked: “You don’t have to drug me.” That memory doesn’t chill me anymore. Now I marvel that even a tortured life was so precious that he clung to it, and that my father fulfilled the poet’s ideal by raging against the dying of the light.
“U.F.O.s. They’re real, you know.” That was the last thing he said to me, possibly delirious, late at night, before his mind sank down into the wreckage of his body.
Did it strike him as the most significant thing he could say before it was all over? Did he realize it was over?
He died on an August afternoon in 1999, sun pouring into the yard. His family all gathered around, waiting for his heart to give. Finally, my grandfather — his father — walked in the front door and picked up his hand. My father made a noise, a cough or sputter, and it was done.
I’ve now spent more years with a dead father than a living one. Along the way, I’ve made peace with a complicated truth about my father’s death. It was both my hardest ordeal and the great catalyst of my life. Seeing this one, seemingly unshakable person die woke me to my own mortality. It drove me to move quickly, constantly, fearlessly toward the things I wanted.
I would undo his death if I could. But the end of him was also the beginning of me. It set me on a path toward everything that I now hold most precious.
I was around 10, and my dad and I were walking in the woods late in winter. He reminded me of a Dr. Seuss character — head bald and round, with chunky glasses and a fringe of black hair, his bulbous torso propped up by spindly, surprisingly quick legs. In my eyes, he was a man of adventure. After college and the Army, he spent years in Europe, living in Spain so long he mastered the language like a native. Trotting to keep up, I asked a question I’d been pondering. How could I have a life as interesting as his?
“Whenever any opportunity comes up, any opportunity at all,” he said, “take it.”
That was the first and last time he gave me a piece of advice. I usually thought that he knew everything but, inexplicably, refused to tell me any of it. I’m not sure whether he realized how closely I watched him — that I picked up things he put down and studied them.
He was the first person I knew who read Sartre, watched Fellini, listened to Wagner. But he never put specific books in my hands. When he watched a movie, you could join him or not. He took us to Mass every Sunday, but I can’t even imagine my dad talking about God or Jesus.
My father communicated in jokes and small talk. He set up softball and croquet in the side yard and kitchen table marathons of Trivial Pursuit. He hosted barbecues that inevitably ended in rain or drove us to his parents’ place and released us into a crowd of cousins so he could drink beer with his dad. He took us to the movies, the beach and camping. He scared us with horror stories like “The Monkey’s Paw.” He kept things moving and kept them light.
I cataloged his habits. He played tennis, drank his coffee black with sugar, bought his beer by the case. He worked as a copy editor at The Hartford Courant. He was a registered independent who never said whom he voted for. He always had a roll of mint Breath Savers, and his steps jangled with loose change. He liked strong flavors — blue cheese, organ meats, the spiciest foods.
All his shirts had breast pockets, because where else would he put his unfiltered Pall Malls? He claimed to have been smoking since he was a young boy in the Bronx, an urban childhood that left his hand disfigured from falling on broken glass while playing street hockey. He hated doctors and dentists, giving us to understand that he’d endured unmentionable torments from 1950s dentists and overzealous Army vaccinators.
His St. Patrick’s Day party always featured a sandwich buffet, fresh whipped cream and Jameson for the coffee. The next morning, I’d find him still holding court with the last wilting die-hards, the Clancy Brothers on the stereo and the living room hazed with smoke.
He baked Valentine’s Day cookies filled with raspberry jam. He once nested orphaned baby field mice in a shoe box and tried to keep them alive, but they died. He never left the house without exuberantly kissing my mother on the lips and dropping a kiss on the heads of his three kids.
When I was a teenager, silence grew between us. I was eager for the world, and I didn’t want my parents to get in my way. The odd thing, I now think, is that they didn’t. My mother had convinced my reluctant father it was better to let teenagers sow their wild oats. The sense of my dad’s wordless disappointment, that I wasn’t dressing or acting or doing anything the way he thought I should, stank up the rooms.
I can’t explain him precisely; I can’t make him add up. He was warm and devoted. He was distant and fearsome. The eldest in a cheerful crowd of eight children, he didn’t quite fit in our comparatively claustrophobic family of five. It probably never occurred to him to converse with his children.
The puzzle of my father was the first great lesson in my life as a writer. He taught me the impossibility of truly knowing another human being, and the power of the one who tells the story.
My dad had a heart attack right at the end of my junior year in college. At the hospital, they discovered he had bladder cancer. He’d ignored the blood in his urine. The doctors thought they could operate. They cut him open only to realize the cancer had spread throughout his organs. The same traits that made him an unreadable father — the impulse to secrecy, to lock complications and difficulties away — would cost him years of life.
They closed him again like a box of hopeless things and announced that he was dying — more quickly, taking drugs to feel better, or more slowly, tortured by aggressive chemotherapy and radiation treatments. He chose the latter. He quit smoking, and I didn’t tell him I thought it was pointless, that he might as well enjoy his remaining cigarettes.
He got sick just as we’d started to address each other like adults with something in common. The year before his cancer was found, I’d been studying in Buenos Aires, writing home long, descriptive letters in a tone I’d never tried out on my parents before — my actual voice, delivered from the safety of far away.
After his diagnosis, we spent a long, uneasy summer at home in Connecticut. My mother cried almost constantly, which seemed to annoy my father, who had tacitly banned his own death from the house. In between my shifts at the coffee bar, I sat with my dad while he watched “60 Minutes” or “Jeopardy” or listened to records. The only clue to the subterranean cataclysm was that we’d started saying “I love you” for the first time in years.
I tried to convince my dad that I should defer my senior year of college and stay home the next year, but he was adamant: I was his last kid, and he wanted to see me graduate. The doctors didn’t think he’d live that long, but he did. He made the trip to my campus in Washington, D.C. He saw me win the departmental prize in Spanish literature — a language I spoke because, as early as I could remember, he spoke it to me.
My father had grown more demanding in his twilight months. Now that I’d graduated, he wanted to see me settled into sustainable employment.
I stayed in Washington, sharing the same illegal basement apartment with college friends and working at a Latin America think tank, answering phones and translating academic papers. I was full of angst, unsure where to go or what to do next.
If I found a reporting job, I decided, both my dad and I would be satisfied. I’d been an editor at the college newspaper, and I missed the bustle of a newsroom. I mailed envelopes stuffed with my clips to newsrooms and cold-called city editors.
Finally, I was offered a job at The El Paso Times. It was an opportunity. Remembering my dad’s advice, I said yes. Before moving to Texas, I went home to Connecticut.
My father was sick and exhausted. My mother was overwhelmed by pre-emptive grief. My sister was driving up and down the turnpike from Boston, taking care of my parents and counseling me like a stand-in parent.
My father was nauseated and weak, but he insisted on taking me to the airport when I left. He gasped and fumbled as we walked to the gate. Finally we sat side by side, staring out the wide windows at a drab airfield, and I felt his familiar silence thicken around us.
“I can’t stand it anymore,” I finally choked out. “Please just go.”
He ignored me. He stayed. I hugged him, afraid it hurt him. Then I hurried onto the plane.
I rushed into young adulthood as if I were fleeing over a burning bridge. There was no going back, because everything behind me was falling apart.
A year slipped past. I’d adjusted to the bright, shellacked skies of El Paso and started to get the hang of covering the phantasmagoric sprawl of Ciudad Juárez, only to move away. I’d gotten another job offer, this time from The Associated Press in Dallas.
My parents pushed me to go. My dad kept getting sicker, but he was proud of my fledgling career. I tried not to let my feelings get hurt by the truth: They didn’t want me to take care of them. They wanted me to lighten their load by taking care of myself.
I’d been in Dallas less than two weeks when my mother called. Come home, she said. It’s the end. I drove to the airport along jammed freeways. The next time I saw this unfamiliar town of flashing surfaces and featureless office towers, I told myself, my father would be dead.
The grief was bright and sharp, shattering in the glare of the Texas sun, pecking back at me as I sat in the bureau, chopping newspaper stories to wire reports, wire reports to news briefs, news briefs to a few lines of broadcast. Learning to cut what could be lost and recognize what was essential.
I hadn’t anticipated yearning for my father, probably because I never truly believed he’d go.
I certainly didn’t expect the whole ordeal would make me feel free for the first time, but it did. Seeing an entire life go dark, and with it all the problems and creeping doubts it had contained, made each moment feel both grand and impermanent. Every day was suddenly vivid and mortal, tumbling toward the death of sunset.
Sometimes I’d work an overnight shift, then drive back to my apartment at sunrise to float under a cloudless sky in the courtyard swimming pool while my neighbors rushed past on their way to work. In grief I was suspended, out of sync, examining existence.
I met people during those raw months who are still good friends. I realize now that my co-workers felt sorry for me — it was a crazy way to start a new job — but, back then, I only registered that everyone was extremely nice to me.
Finding myself in the unfamiliar landscapes of Texas, working an adult job and living in my adult apartment fed the sense that, somehow, my father’s death had shuttled me into a new life. Everything was strange to me, and I wrote about it. No matter where I went, I never felt afraid; my worst fear had happened, and I already knew I was going to die. I worked constantly, with full attention, because it distracted me from the memory of my father at the end, all bones and angry eyes. I drugged myself with work, hid inside work, wrote in my spare time just to keep my mind fixed on something that had a shape.
All that work brought opportunity, and I always said yes. Houston, the Rio Grande Valley, immigration, courts, the death chamber. Then Afghanistan, Jerusalem, Egypt, onward through the world. I didn’t mind working in dangerous places, among people killing and dying. Ever since I had watched my father die, I had found the margin between life and death oddly familiar. It was only when I had kids of my own that I felt true fear again, understanding that if I died, I could no longer protect them in this fickle life.
My dad never saw his grandkids, or met my husband. But he’s always come along with me in my mind; I’ve imagined him so vividly into family birthdays and board games that those scenes have ended up mingled with real memories. Sometimes, looking at my kids, I get the strange feeling they’ve met him already. Like my dad was just here.
